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RANZCO and refugees

Dear Editor,

On 16 March 2022, the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Ophthalmologists (RANZCO) endorsed an inaugural Position Statement on refugees. Entitled ‘Providing Equitable Access to Eye Health Care for Refugees and People Seeking Asylum’, the document was approved after nine months of deliberations. As an ophthalmologist, I was the paper’s lead author. RANZCO now joins fourteen other medical and nursing colleges in Australia with a policy on refugee health. On the one hand, we are a late addition to this group; on the other, we are the first surgical college to adopt such a position (while individual surgeons have spoken out, the Royal Australian College of Surgeons remains silent on this issue).

The Position Statement makes four key recommendations. One, refugees and people seeking asylum should be provided with access to comprehensive eye assessments. Most receive general health assessments on arrival in Australia, but eye health is not always included. Two, those that need it should receive access to eye-care services, such as glasses (optometry) or eye surgery (ophthalmology), irrespective of visa or Medicare status. Three, we do not condone mandatory, indefinite detention for refugees, especially children, given the detrimental health impacts of prolonged incarceration, and the pursuant risks to vision. Finally, we need to grow the evidence base on the eye health of refugees, an area that currently lacks research. Clearly, much work lies ahead.

RANZCO’s Position Statement was conceived in 2020– 21 during my time as ABR’s Behrouz Boochani Fellow. As such, a straight line can be drawn between an investment in the literary arts and the potential to improve people’s lives. The arts, in other words, can be an activator for humanitarianism. Thank you to Peter McMullin (who funded the Fellowship) and ABR; long may these investments continue.

Hessom Razavi, North Perth, WA

Black mist

Dear Editor,

Michael Winkler has written a sharp and insightful review of my latest book, The Secret of Emu Field: Britain’s forgotten atomic tests in Australia (ABR, May 2022). I am really glad to see his thorough and sensitive understanding of its story about the Operation Totem tests at the South Australian test site in 1953.  He quite rightly wonders why I did not use the infamous quote about the Totem I ‘black mist’ from the British scientist Ernest Titterton, who was quoted in the media in 1980 following the first public disclosures of the phenomenon: ‘No such thing can possibly occur, I don’t know of any black mists ... The radioactive cloud is in fact at 30,000 feet, not at ground level. And it’s not black ... if you investigate black mist, sure your [sic] going to get into an area where mystique is the central feature and you’ll never be able to establish [it] or not.’

I had used part of this quote in my earlier book, Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga story, in the short section devoted to the Emu Field tests, so I made the decision not to reuse it in the new book. But I agree that it is a resonant quote, and one that points to Titterton’s dismissive attitude to any safety concerns around the conduct of British atomic tests in Australia.

Elizabeth Tynan, Alligator Creek, Qld

Eighteen up

Dear Editor,

Further to Faith Gordon’s argument about the disenfranchisement of sixteen-year-olds (‘The Case for Lowering the Voting Age’, ABR, May 2022), I would like to add that current sixteen-year-olds will not have a chance to vote federally until they are nineteen. In New South Wales they won’t vote in a state election until they are twenty-one. The statutory terms of Australian parliaments means that most people must wait well beyond the age of eighteen for their first chance to vote.

Retrieving Hemisphere

Dear Editor,

Steps are underway to enable the digitising of an important general interest Australian periodical from last century: Hemisphere – An Asian-Australian Monthly (later Magazine bimonthly), which was published by and for the Commonwealth of Australia from 1957–84. Some readers may recall the periodical, which was edited by two outstanding editors: R.J. Maguire (1957–69) and then Ken Henderson (1969–84).

A loose grouping of persons with interests in Australian literature (and environmental history), as well as others with a focus on Asian studies, have followed with interest these developments. Funds have now been raised through donation to enable the National Library of Australia to proceed with will project so that eventually, through TROVE, new generations might be able to access the material originally produced in print.

Hemisphere was unique compared to other Australian general interest periodicals of the mid-twentieth century; perhaps only Hemisphere combined ‘Australian’ and ‘Asian’ material in its remit. It explored the ‘deep cultures’ embedded in these two terms. It moved beyond the sole imperative of defining ‘Australia’ to having a vision of the region beyond. (It was also probably unique in that although it began publication by and for the then-small Commonwealth Office of Education in North Sydney, it was published from Canberra for most of its publication life). It was not ‘controversial’ in dealing with Australian foreign policy and political issues of the day, such as the Vietnam War, and from current perspectives it lacked an autonomous Indigenous Australian focus, although, via articles on Australian ‘prehistory’, it was a significant publication that conveyed to the general reader scientific work of the era that broadened awareness of Indigenous settlement in Australia to beyond 60,00 years.

I trust this advice will be of some interest and that this important project will provide new generations with past perspectives on Australia and the region generally. 

Ian Campbell, Sydney, NSW

Keepers of the flame

As in 2021, ABR readers won’t have to endure the winter with a double issue in June and July. We are delighted to present a discrete June edition.

Highlights include extensive coverage of Gwen Harwood’s life and work – and the complicated biographical project that Advances has followed with interest for some years. Harwood scholar Stephanie Trigg reviews Ann-Marie Priest’s biography, My Tongue Is My Own: A life of Gwen Harwood (La Trobe University Press).

Elsewhere, Gwen Harwood’s son and literary executor, John Harwood – a biographer himself – contributes a fascinating account of his management of this celebrated literary estate since the poet’s death in 1995. The article, ‘Gwen Harwood and the Perils of Reticence’, is an interesting addendum to Ian Hamilton’s seminal book Keepers of the Flame: Literary estates and the rise of biography (1992).

Harwood writes candidly about difficulties in his parents’ long marriage and about his resolve to obviate any hurt to his father: ‘I loved my parents equally and was determined that, so far as I had anything to do with it, nothing that might distress my father or his many old friends would find its way into print.’ He writes about the ‘collision course’ he was set on with one of his mother’s early proposed biographers, Gregory Kratzmann, who subsequently withdrew. Now, like Advances, Harwood welcomes Priest’s detailed and absorbing biography.

These two features are complemented by one of Gwen Harwood’s most withering poems, ‘Suburban Sonnet’.

Other highlights include Elizabeth Tynan on nuclear colonialism in the 1950s, typified by the Menzies government’s craven approval of British atomic tests at Emu Field in South Australia, which is the subject of her recent book, The Secret of Emu Field.

In coming months, the Supreme Court of the United States is expected to overturn Roe v. Wade, a landmark decision offering constitutional protection of a pregnant woman’s freedom to have an abortion. As American women contemplate the impact of this judgment – perhaps the apogee of conversative judicial activism in the United States – we are pleased to be able to publish an essay by Sydney obstetrician Linda Atkins. ‘Shouting Abortion’ was shortlisted for the 2022 Calibre Essay Prize.

Generous support from Matthew Sandblom and Wendy Beckett’s Blake Beckett Fund underpins this extra issue. We thank them both warmly.

Prize tentacles

Warm congratulations to critic and filmmaker Anne Rutherford, whose review of My Octopus Teacher for ABR (published online in February 2021 and also available as a podcast) has taken out the Australian Film Critics Association’s award for the best review of an international film. This is the tenth occasion on which the awards have been presented by AFCA, the leading body of film critics in Australia and an affiliate of FIPRESCI, the international association of film critics and journalists. Rutherford’s review, a subtle probing of both the ‘kinaesthetic pleasure of watching the octopus move’ and the ethics of anthropomorphism, was her début in ABR. We look forward to more from her in the future and, without resting on our laurels, we take it to be a promising sign that the magazine’s arts coverage is hitting the mark.

Prizes galore

When the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize closed in early May, we had received 1,325 entries, from thirty-six different countries. Each year our three literary competitions – the Jolley, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Calibre Essay Prize – generate thousands of new literary works that otherwise might never be written. It’s a fillip, an incentive, with a total of $12,500 in prize money to be dispersed. Judging is now underway. We look forward to publishing the three shortlisted stories in our August issue and then naming the winner towards the end of that month.

Meanwhile, the Porter Prize, now in its nineteenth year, will open on 11 July, with total prize money of $10,000.

Walking the walk on climate change

The season of electioneering and democracy sausages may be over, yet the issue of climate change remains acute, heedless of the political calendar. Most writers are by nature solitary creatures, and so heartening it is to see them band together for the Writers on Climate Action initiative. Led by Kate Grenville, the group wants climate to be at the forefront of voters’ minds each time they head to the polls. As Grenville writes in her ‘Book Talk’ feature:

We’ve got a lot of urgent issues swirling in our minds.  The cost of living, employment, refugees, taxes, corruption, defence, Indigenous justice ... They’re all important and they’ll all shape our future. But the writers who have come together believe that one issue underlies all the others: the need for a reliable climate.

This is not about politicking in the conventional sense of ‘pushing any particular candidate or party’; rather, it is about making action on climate change an indispensable part of any political platform.

On the road

Masks on and passports at the ready – ABR is delighted to be presenting several cultural tours with Academy Travel in 2022 and 2023 across Australia and – mirabile dictu – abroad.

First up is an eight-day tour (October 12–19) exploring some of Victoria’s most beautiful countryside, historic towns and cities, and superb regional galleries. A group of no more than sixteen will be led by ABR’s Development Consultant, Christopher Menz, through some of Australia’s oldest regional galleries as well as the wonderful modern and contemporary collections at Heide and TarraWarra.

See the ABR or Academy Travel websites for full details. Book now before it’s too late! 

New directions

As we go to press on 23 May, the status of the new Labor government – majority or minority – is undecided, but it’s clear that the Coalition government led by Scott Morrison has been defeated. He leaves a stain on our public life that may take years to eradicate. Only a national integrity commission – of the unfettered kind proposed by Labor and teal candidates during the campaign, and strongly advocated by some of our most distinguished jurists – will reveal the full extent of the profligacy and impropriety of the outgoing regime. It cannot come soon enough.

Next month we will invite a number of commentators to nominate one policy direction they would like Anthony Albanese’s government to pursue over the next three years.

At the top of my own desiderata would be a long-overdue investigation of Rupert Murdoch’s malign role in Australian politics, plus a more edifying style of campaigning, without puerile ‘gotcha’ moments and endless talk of election sausages. We must be able to do better than this. Ed.

‘You look a little shy; let me introduce you to that leg of mutton,’ said the Red Queen. ‘Alice – Mutton; Mutton – Alice.’ The leg of mutton got up in the dish and made a little bow to Alice; and Alice returned the bow, not knowing whether to be frightened or amused.

‘May I give you a slice?’ she said, taking up the knife and fork, and looking from one Queen to the other.

‘Certainly not,’ the Red Queen said, very decidedly: ‘it isn’t etiquette to cut any one you’ve been introduced to. Remove the joint!’

Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, 1865

The Red Queen’s impossible rule offers a striking allegory of the biographer’s dilemma. While your subject is still alive, it seems reasonable to get to know them and build a relationship of trust with them. In this way you might be better able to understand their private and intimate worlds. If your subject is a writer, you might become more confident in your ability to weave closer correspondences between their life and work. But if you then become privy to their secrets, and perhaps even come to love them as a dear friend, it becomes almost impossible to write about them dispassionately: to ‘cut’ them with your knife and fork.

This quandary is particularly pointed when the subject is someone like Gwen Harwood (1920–95), so famously adept at masking both her authorial name and her poetic voice. As Ann-Marie Priest shows, Harwood was extremely guarded and careful in her writing, displacing and concealing most of her grand passions and emotional trials from those who would have been hurt by a more open, confessional poetics.

Two other scholars attempted to write Harwood’s biography in the several years before the poet’s death in 1995. Alison Hoddinott, already an old friend and the author of a critical study of Harwood’s poetry, started conceiving a biography around the same time as Greg Kratzmann wrote introducing himself to Harwood with the same idea. Harwood kept each in ignorance of the other’s plans, and eventually both withdrew from the task. Kratzmann became a dear friend and confidant of Harwood, but he found himself unable to write the kind of biography he wanted, because he was unwilling to expose details of Harwood’s relationships that had potential to hurt her family and friends, even after her death. He had to promise Harwood he would not write anything that would ‘cause pain’. Instead, he turned his attention to editing her letters (A Steady Storm of Correspondence, 2001); and, with Hoddinott, edited Harwood’s Collected Poems, 1943–1995, in 2003. Hoddinott also published a collection of Harwood’s letters (Idle Talk, Letters 1960–1964, 2015).

As Hoddinott and Kratzmann both found, and as Priest was warned, writing a biography of Gwen Harwood is not for the faint-hearted. But Priest is unencumbered by a strong personal connection to Harwood or her family. Writing more than twenty years after Harwood’s death, when so many of the poet’s beloved friends and friendly beloveds are now also dead, has surely been liberating, too.  

Priest interviewed a number of Harwood’s friends and correspondents, but she works primarily from textual evidence, and approaches this emotional minefield with forensic precision. She moves with ease through the archives: Harwood’s voluminous correspondence, some diaries and various documents from private and public collections: most notably, the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland, where Priest based herself for six months. Priest is an attentive reader of Harwood’s poetry: from the formal collections and libretti through to her occasional verse, and the many unpublished fragments, often hilarious and scurrilous, that appeared in her letters and postcards. Harwood also often wrote letters about her dreams, which add a surprisingly luminous dimension to this study. Priest builds her narrative from the overlapping threads of Harwood’s reading and writing, her playful multiplication of voices and personae, her musical and philosophical studies, and the many vicissitudes of the writing life. More personal material is handled gently: especially the shifting dynamics of a very difficult marriage; and the ebb and flow of various friendships and several love affairs, mostly with men, and sometimes, though these relationships were perhaps less sexual, with women.

The public path of Harwood’s life is well known. After showing early promise as a pianist and organist, she married young and moved from Brisbane to Hobart in 1943 with her academic husband. After her four children were all established at school, she started slowly publishing the poetry she had been working on, but she could not help feeling distanced from the poetic and cultural gatekeepers of Australia in the 1950s, both by geography and by gender. Inventing several pseudonyms, mostly male ones, with more intriguing cultural biographies than her own, she managed to place many more poems in key journals. In the first years of her publishing career, these male personae received far more invitations to participate in anthologies and other literary events than Harwood ever did. Harwood’s fury at these exclusions and her contempt for the poor literary judgement and favouritism practised by more established poets are presented forcefully here.

Her first major brush with fame came in 1961, when Douglas Stewart at The Bulletin accepted the sonnet she submitted over the name ‘Walter Lehmann’, with its now famous ‘FUCKALLEDITORS’ acrostic. The ensuing scandal and Harwood’s unmasking set up a powerful dichotomy in Harwood’s reception, fuelled by the shocking image of the ‘Tas housewife’ on the verge of being prosecuted for obscenity. It was a powerful declaration that she should not be pigeonholed as a domestic goddess.

After her first volume of Poems was published (not until 1963), Harwood’s reputation as a poet and librettist began to grow steadily, and in the last years of her life she was honoured many times over, with prizes, fellowships, several honorary degrees, and the Order of Australia. She died in 1995, at the age of seventy-five, and remains one of Australia’s pre-eminent poets.

Many of her poems offer deeply felt meditations about language, philosophy, dreamscapes, and music, as well as surreal visions, flights of fancy, and dizzying wordplay. Harwood’s technical facility with metre and form was outstanding, though it is often noted that in her later works the poetic line breathes a little more easily. Some of her poems and, later, her comments in interviews drew attention to the difficulties of balancing household and familial demands with the need for solitude and writing time. There is also a strong strand of her work engaging with romantic and sexual desire.

When I was working on Harwood’s poetry in the early 1990s, it was hard not to wonder about these poems that spoke to such deep sexual passion but also – though less blatantly – about the apparent frustrations and difficulties in a long marriage. Were these love poems textual experiments, inspired by the long history of erotic literature in English? Were they to be read as if written by different, though unnamed, voices or personae? Were they reliving old memories? Or were they poems arising from current or recent sexual affairs? It seemed to me that this latter, most likely scenario was indeed the case, but just as Greg Kratzmann had pulled back from writing Harwood’s biography, I also felt that if these stories had not been made public, it was not my business to speculate about them. In any case, as Harwood had written to Tony Riddell in 1959, ‘To me now it seems impossible to see beneath the surface of women if they don’t show their interior life of their own accord.’

Freed from the power to hurt, this biography opens up the complex private world behind Harwood’s emergence as a public figure, by exploring the unpublished web of dispersed texts in which Harwood did disclose much of her interior life. With the benefit of distance and hindsight, Priest unfolds a nuanced and layered version of Harwood’s emotional life, her bouts with depression, anxiety, anger, and frustration, as well as her deep passions, both inside her marriage and beyond it. One of the most poignant and painful threads is the number of times Gwen contemplated leaving her husband, Bill, even while still feeling bound to him in many ways. He was jealous of her friendships, and for many years forbade her to write to Riddell, her oldest and most intimate friend. He was also angry whenever he felt her poetry violated his own privacy.

Even when Harwood finally managed to scrape together some financial independence, she found it impossible to wound or hurt her increasingly ill husband by leaving him, even though she raged against his contempt for poetry, his evident misanthropy and growing social isolation, just as she was starting to revel in the pleasure of travelling and entertaining, meeting other poets and musicians, and enjoying the fruits of her success as a writer.

Priest unravels the long threads of Harwood’s most important and loving friendships, going right back to her first great love, Peter Bennie. Without sensationalising these stories, Priest traces Harwood’s involvement in several passionate sexual relationships, with Tom Pick, Norman Talbot, one or two others, perhaps; and a number of deeply romantic and loving friendships with women: especially Ann Jennings, Vera Cottew, and Lotte Wilmot. Some friendships (for example, with Vincent Buckley and James McCauley) began in enmity and ended in loving affection. Other friendships were punctuated or ended by misunderstandings and perceived betrayals. Of all these relationships, perhaps the most moving is the story of Harwood’s last intimate love, Rosemary Cohen, who took turns with Bill Harwood attending Gwen on her deathbed.

This is a compelling biography. It offers no great challenge to the genre: it is not particularly experimental; and nor does Priest foreground her own voice, judgements, or decisions. Brief remarks about local and cultural contexts are offered at various times, but rightly, I think, Priest puts Harwood’s voice – or rather, her many voices – at the heart of this volume. 

Priest explains her choice of title in the brief introduction to My Tongue Is My Own. For Harwood, ‘Owning her tongue was about claiming the right not only to speak but also to be silent – even to lie. It was about using her voice as she chose: to hide or to reveal herself, to try out different characters, different truths and possibilities, and to speak … the love she felt compelled to own.’

As Harwood lay dying, Cohen offered to move closer to care for her, but Harwood refused. ‘I don’t want a broom-wielder or assistant laundress,’ she said. ‘I want a crazy selfish bright-tongued lover.’ It is this glittering, passionate voice – Harwood’s own tongue – that now rings loud and clear.

Suburban Sonnet

She practises a fugue, though it can matter
to no one now if she plays well or not.
Beside her on the floor two children chatter,
then scream and fight. She hushes them. A pot
boils over. As she rushes to the stove
too late, a wave of nausea overpowers
subject and counter-subject. Zest and love
drain out with soapy water as she scours
the crusted milk. Her veins ache. Once she played
for Rubinstein, who yawned. The children caper
round a sprung mousetrap where a mouse lies dead.
When the soft corpse won’t move they seem afraid.
She comforts them; and wraps it in a paper
featuring: Tasty dishes from stale bread.

Gwen Harwood

Correction

In the print version of this review reference was made to ‘the absence of an index’. The finished version of My Tongue Is My Own does contain an index.

Hannah Gadsby’s show Nanette (2017–18) starts out funny but then shifts to long, angry monologues that refuse its audience the release of laughter. By breaking the conventional contract between a comedian and her audience, Gadsby rejected her own former practice of turning her traumatic experiences into jokes. Nanette’s international run and subsequent release as a Netflix special spanned the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which gauged public support for marriage equality, as well as the international #MeToo movement against sexual assault. As high-profile performers such as Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby respectively admitted to and were tried for sexual misconduct, comedians became important figures in public debates about the relationship between artists and their work. Gadsby brought to these debates the perspective of a gender non-conforming lesbian and sexual assault survivor from rural Tasmania. Nanette became an emblem of queer and feminist anger or – depending on one’s point of view – of the humourless, politically correct ‘cancel culture’ many comedians rail against.

In the chaos that opened the Trump administration in 2017, foreign governments were looking for any and all insiders for information. Australia turned to Joe Hockey, who turned to golf. In this very readable account of the former treasurer’s four years in Washington (2016–20), Hockey tells us how he navigated ‘TRUMPAGEDDON’. This is a story replete with funny anecdotes and unsettling observations. Diplomatic leaves the reader convinced that diplomacy is more about art and luck than about science and process. It is also oddly reassuring about the vicissitudes that the Australia–United States relations can weather, even under the most weird leadership.

Picture, poem, or puzzle? The Chinese written character has been one of the most enduring obstacles to and catalysts for intercultural appreciation. When, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel wanted to demonstrate the relative backwardness of Oriental thought, he could find no better exhibit than the form of its writing. Attached as it was to ‘the sensuous image’, the putatively pictographic Chinese character forfeited access to the conceptual abstraction that afforded European thinkers their passports to the ‘free, ideal realm of Spirit’. Yet a century later, it was this very characterisation of Chinese writing – as irreducibly concrete and free of intellectual mediation – that persuaded the philologist Ernest Fenollosa and poet Ezra Pound of its therapeutic promise for Western art. ‘Full of the sap of nature’, the Chinese character would inject primitivist vitality into the dry husks of romanised verbiage. What had made it peripheral to the historical florescence of ‘reason’ now legitimised it in the name of aesthetic modernism.

When Ann-Marie Priest wrote to me in 2015 asking whether she might talk to me about her proposed biography of my mother, and requesting my permission to examine some correspondence in the Fryer Library, which I, as Gwen Harwood’s literary executor, had placed on restricted access, I replied with a terse refusal to cooperate. Since my mother’s death in December 1995, I had kept tight control of her vast correspondence, nearly all of which she had donated to various research libraries over the last two decades of her life, and I saw no reason to change my ways.

As a biographer myself and a great admirer of Ian Hamilton’s Keepers of the Flame: Literary estates and the rise of biography (1992), I knew perfectly well what I was doing. The archetypical stand-off between would-be biographer and family executor had not changed, in essence, since the Copyright Act 1842, which, as Hamilton remarks,

had the effect of intensifying the involvement of wives, sons and daughters in the administration of their loved-one’s literary leavings. The prompt issue of a family-controlled biography would, it was perceived, both safeguard the biographee’s good name (by forestalling unauthorised attempts) and also see to it that the good name was, so to speak, kept warm … A legend could be fed and milked. After the funeral would come the slamming of doors, the scrubbing of marble and then, within two years or so, the emergence of what Gladstone called ‘a Reticence in three volumes’.

Gwen Harwood, however, had no desire for a Reticence. Quite the contrary; in the last years of her life, she enlisted not one but two official biographers: Alison Hoddinott, an old family friend, editor of Blessed City (1990), the young Gwendoline Foster’s wartime letters to her best friend Thomas Riddell, and author of Gwen Harwood: The real and the imagined world, a necessarily reticent life-and-work-in-progress; and the late Gregory Kratzmann, then a lecturer in English at La Trobe University. She promised them both her full support, and, it must be said, led them a merry dance, until Hoddinott sensibly withdrew from the floor. My mother’s plan was to oversee the writing of her own life, and to this end she not only gave Kratzmann exclusive access to everything she had already donated to libraries, but also began sending him jiffy bags full of her incoming correspondence.

At a dinner party recently, the conversation turned to how our language gives away our age. No more so than in the use of slang, proposed one guest, who suggested that each person’s use of slang, like a favourite pop song, is frozen in time from their teenage years. Take, for example, terms for something considered ‘wonderful’. The theory goes that if someone still says swell, tickety-boo, or snazzy, chances are they were teenagers during World War II. Boomers, those born after the war until the mid-1960s, are the most likely to use super duper, wild, or far out. Someone nearing fifty, a Gen Xer, is probably the most likely to say brill or wicked. Millennials and Gen Z would be the ones saying crunk, wig, and slaps.

Like the Booker-winning Shuggie Bain (2020), Douglas Stuart’s second novel is set in the post-Thatcher, post-industrial, working-class Glasgow housing schemes dominated by unemployment and dysfunctional families. Both novels are populated with alcoholic mothers and violent or absent fathers whose neglected children are forever vulnerable to abuse and hardship. Their titular protagonists must fit into their environment if they want to survive, but neither possesses that talent.

Shuggie detests the untidiness of other boys and their passion for sport, their assertive physicality, and Mungo exhibits a similar wariness. Shuggie dances compulsively; Mungo has a facial tic. They both walk with feminine flourishes that can’t be modified. Other boys conceal their fears and yearnings, but theirs rise to the surface. One character observes of Mungo: ‘It’s like your face has a mind of its own. It’s showing what you feel on the inside without ye even asking it.’

The social worlds and domestic lives represented in Stuart’s novels threaten to produce caricatures instead of rounded figures. These are extreme settings with outsized personalities that are formed (or malformed) by intense experiences. There is little room for subtlety. In Shuggie Bain, if a boy is violent or abusive, a violent and abusive father is quickly introduced to explain the boy’s behaviour. The same patterns apply in Young Mungo. Mungo’s older brother, Hamish, is a brutal and domineering gang leader, much like his dead father. We learn that he was viciously strapped by his mother as punishment for misbehaviour as a child and that he had to repress any desire for nurture and safety. Hamish despises softness because he has been deprived of it, just as he despises the middle-class Glaswegians who ‘draped the city about themselves like a trendy jacket, but they knew none of its chill, none of its need’.

Mungo struggles to read people effectively, to ‘see the difference between what someone said and what they truly meant’. This deficit leaves him continually susceptible to manipulation and peril. The reader is always worried for him. Mungo is named after a saint and, like Shuggie before him, is saintly in his predispositions. Perhaps this is a product of youthfulness: Saint Mungo becomes Young Mungo, who is so vulnerable, neglected, and brutalised that he can only be an exemplar of virtue. While his siblings respond to their childhood deprivations by acquiring a thick skin or embracing a cynical world view, Mungo retains a need to trust and love people who are inclined to exploit his need.

Mungo’s love is only truly reciprocated by two people. One is his older, intelligent, industrious sister, Jodie, who does the bulk of the parenting in their household. Jodie cannot wholly fill the void left by their dead father and largely absent and self-absorbed mother. Nor does she want to. Instead, she wants Mungo to develop a capacity to survive without being mothered, as she has. If he can achieve this, Jodie will be liberated from the self-sacrifice required to care for him and freed to cultivate her own talents. But Mungo is a resolutely childlike fifteen-year-old. Only extreme events will jolt him out of his dependence. 

Hamish exhibits a more troubling interest in Mungo. He expects his brother to grow into a version of their father, to fight Catholics, exude toughness, and embrace tribal hatred and domination – to be the hunter instead of the hunted in a social environment that punishes perceived weakness. It is the kind of man the soft-hearted Mungo can never be.

Gentleness carries class and gender connotations in this milieu. It is a quality, or collection of habits, that commonly develops in the safe cocoon of unbroken families headed by fathers with soft hands. To be gentle and naïve instead of hard and cynical is to exhibit attributes of the enemy. A member of Hamish’s gang is called a ‘poofter’ because he occasionally slips into ‘the Queen’s English’ and has ‘a proud mother and a working father who still lived at home’. A stable family and sound education are forms of treacherous otherness. It’s even worse to be gay. In the context of Hamish’s gang, and the macho ethos of the Glasgow schemes, ‘There was nothing more shameful than being a poofter; powerless, soft as a woman.’

One of the more sympathetic men in the novel lives outside of Glasgow. He describes his own possibly gay (or perhaps just feminine or odd) son as ‘artistic’, and guesses that Mungo is artistic too. Gently he suggests to Mungo that he will need to ‘go off in search of people that like the same things as him’. For Mungo, the man’s soft hands ‘spoke of days sat reading books in the sun’. The habit of tender concern belongs to other social worlds, or to those who don’t fit in.

Mungo’s innate and expressive vulnerability finds its match in James, a Catholic boy who is still grieving the loss of his mother. The two boys are desperate for maternal comfort and support, which they can never have. They fall in love and into dangerous conflict with Hamish and the prevailing social prejudices. Half of the narrative of Young Mungo is infused with strains of Romeo and Juliet or West Side Story. Most of its ingredients promise tragedy. The other half is more like a horror story. When Mungo’s mother sends him off to learn how to ‘be a man’ with two sketchy strangers, we expect the worst.

The young protagonists of Stuart’s novels are subjected to hardship but don’t inflict it. They are on the side of loving innocence and avoid conflict when they can. The redeeming strength of Shuggie Bain is its focus on a mother who cannot escape addiction and despair. She is a destructive presence in her children’s lives, but she is not a bad person. The harmful or malignant characters in Young Mungo are simpler kinds of sinners, and Mungo exhibits no humanising flaws. He is a saint who endures great trials and demands our sympathy. This makes for a narrative that is full of eloquent feeling but thin on complexity and novelty.

Two new novels probe national myths and histories, offering insights into the political and religious forces that continue to shape contemporary conflicts.

Set during the height of the Troubles, Irish writer Audrey Magee’s The Colony begins with English artist Mr Lloyd travelling to a remote island off Ireland’s west coast, ‘a rock cutting into the ocean, splitting, splintering, shredding the water’. Lloyd insists on being ferried across by currach rather than by the motorboat the islanders themselves use when crossing to the mainland, a requirement that immediately foregrounds how much of Lloyd’s conception of the island is bound up in romanticised notions of the bleak Irish landscape and the hardy individuals – twelve families in all – who inhabit it.

What happens when we die? Human curiosity about the afterlife has inspired countless artists and storytellers from the earliest myths through to Dante and Boccaccio. More recently we’ve had Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002) and George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), as well as sitcoms like Netflix’s philosophical The Good Place and Amazon’s capitalist dystopia Upload, and now Steve Toltz’s alternately bleak and bonkers take in Here Goes Nothing.

Here Goes Nothing is the third volume in Toltz’s thematic ‘trilogy of fear’, a voluble sequence of dark comic novels that Toltz has described as ‘spiritual autobiographies’. The books variously explore the fear of death (the Booker-shortlisted A Fraction of the Whole, 2008), the fear of life and suffering (Quicksand, 2015) and now, the fear of the opinions of others (with a variety of other fears thrown in for good measure). The tone is set from the beginning as a character sardonically reflects: ‘Nobody was ever thinking about me. Now that I’m dead, I dwell on this kind of thing a lot’. He goes on to question why he wasn’t more experimental sexually when he was alive: ‘So what if I was heterosexual? Don’t most vegetarians eat fish?’

Toltz has always liked exploring philosophical and metaphysical questions in his fiction. In Here Goes Nothing, he takes this predilection in new and sometimes unexpected directions. The novel is presented in two intertwined narratives. The first follows occasional petty criminal and former foster child Angus Mooney as he wakes up in an unexpectedly bureaucratic version of the afterlife, where his harried ‘welcome clerk’ offers him an ‘Interim Death Certificate’ and an envelope full of discount vouchers. Angus is shocked to realise that he was wrong about life after death, and to discover that he is now existing as his ‘quintessential self’ in an unsettling place where he worries there may be ‘more human centipedes than centipedes’. This version of the afterlife is compelling, although many of the lingering questions the reader may have about its workings are glossed over when Angus conveniently misses his orientation session.

The second storyline is set in a perturbing near-future Sydney. While mostly recounted posthumously by Angus, this narrative begins a little while before his death when the ‘owlish’ Owen Fogel rings the doorbell of the house where Angus and his wife, Gracie, live and asks to be shown around ‘for old time’s sake’. Owen soon inveigles his way into their domestic lives as an unorthodox houseguest. For a while, Gracie, Angus, and Owen make an entertainingly unlikely trio. Gracie is an unconventional marriage celebrant with a mild social media addiction. She and Angus met when she officiated his best friend’s wedding, cheerfully haranguing the bemused couple before offering them a list of ‘survival tools’ including ‘No bathroom lightbulbs over 40 watts!’ Unlike Angus, who is a ‘total and shameless sceptic’, Gracie is naturally curious and open to spiritual and supernatural possibilities. Angus is more circumspect and easily embarrassed than his gloriously blunt wife, but his self-consciousness pales in comparison with Owen’s, which causes the latter to be mortified by almost everything, from New Year resolutions to ice-cream. Meanwhile, there are troubling news reports about an ancient virus that has started to infect domestic dogs in Greenland after the discovery of a Pleistocene wolf.

Sometime-screenwriter Toltz gleefully ignores the old Hollywood maxim about killing dogs with the creation of the ‘K9 virus’ (also known as ‘the Siberian flu, or Man’s Best Virus, or the Good Boy Disease’), a plague that has arrived nipping at the heels of the now vanquished Covid-19 though exponentially more deadly. For the first part of the novel, this new pandemic plays out mostly in the background, but the ramifications become increasingly urgent as Owen’s illness and Gracie’s pregnancy progress.

Fans of Toltz’s previous two novels will find much to appreciate here. In a 2015 interview with the Los Angeles Review of Books, Toltz observed that ‘one’s style is like one’s smell … it is what it is, and it’s applied to whatever the story is.’  This is certainly the case for this sequence of novels. Although not explicitly connected, these frenetic, questioning, list-filled narratives share an idiosyncratic flavour and could all take place in the same universe (which would raise interesting questions about the fate of one character in Quicksand who came to believe he was immortal). Certain Toltzean archetypes recur, including that of the dangerous mentor, and Toltz again deploys a mixture of different writing styles and formats. Online reviews and social media posts are used to great effect, especially a harrowing livestream. Big questions are explored through a mix of dark humour, unexpected situations, and zingy one-liners. Group therapy sessions and religious services in the afterlife are a highlight.

Toltz covers a lot of ground in Here Goes Nothing, offering filibustering commentary on a miscellany of ideas including the importance of ritual, the cult-like aspects of work, the ethics of haunting, and musings on magnetism. The worlds he creates are vivid and compelling. From Heidegger to Roald Dahl, allusions and references abound, while in the afterlife long-dead artists create new works of varying quality. That death is not necessarily the end does lower the stakes a little, but there are times where this is an undeniable relief.

Here Goes Nothing is dizzying and sometimes dazzling. Though the darkness of the content might discourage some readers (lethal plagues, countless deaths, environmental degradation, war, the bleak inscrutability of bureaucracy, and the abject plight of ‘interdimensional refugees’), Toltz’s humour seldom falters. Instead, he wields invention like a torch as he highlights and moves past a diabolical number of questions and concepts, dropping aphorisms and observations like embers. 

‘Everyone knows how it ends,’ declares Ruby ‘Red’ McCoy, the fourteen-year-old narrator of Felicity McLean’s second novel, Red. ‘What people are less interested in hearing is how it all got started.’

The ending in question is Ruby’s attempted murder of a police officer, a crime that is heralded from the novel’s outset. In this retelling of the Ned Kelly legend, McLean sets Red apart from existing depictions of the bushranger – from Sidney Nolan’s iconic series of paintings (1946–47) to Peter Carey’s novel True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) and its subsequent punk-infused 2019 film adaptation by Justin Kurzel. She casts the mouthy, cocksure Ruby in the role of Kelly and transports the action to New South Wales’s Central Coast, circa 1989. It is a curious mash-up, though less surprising in the context of McLean’s oeuvre; her 2019 début, The Van Apfel Girls are Gone, similarly fused Gen X nostalgia with the influence of another classic Australian tale, Picnic at Hanging Rock.

Winner of the University of Tasmania Prize for best new unpublished work in the 2019 Tasmanian Premier’s Literary Prizes, The Signal Line is Brendan Colley’s first book. As it happens, my review copy arrived just as I launched into Rhett Davis’s Hovering (2022). Although fundamentally different, both novels open with a fraught return to a family home and a resident resentful sibling. Both protagonists have built a new life in Europe, but where Hovering suggests the possible remaking of the old house into some version of home, The Signal Line seeks to relinquish it.

At the beginning of 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write (2014), author, mother, and playwright Sarah Ruhl notes: ‘At the end of the day, writing has very little to do with writing, and much to do with life. And life, by definition, is not an intrusion.’ Ceridwen Dovey and Eliza Bell’s Mothertongues embraces, embodies even, this collapse of the boundaries between living and writing. Rather than extolling the proverbial ‘room of her own’, Bell and Dovey are asking us to heed the kinds of knowledge that come from being embedded in the everyday. A hybrid, genre-defying book about contemporary motherhood, Mothertongues is woven from fragments based on the authors’ own lives, from texts both historical and literary, from imagined conversations and family histories, from the act of friendship itself. It is intimate, moving from levity to depth, the corporeal to the cerebral, in the space of a page, a paragraph, a breath. It is a collection of ephemera – a stray thought, the contents of a handbag, breastfeeding diary excerpts, book lists, text message exchanges – that, taken together, form a living archive of twenty-first-century motherhood.

The Burnished Sun by Mirandi Riwoe, Danged Black Thing by Eugen Bacon, and Sadvertising by Ennis Ćehić are powerful, inventive, and self-assured short story collections that traverse fractured and contested ground through their often displaced and alienated narrators.

The Burnished Sun by Mirandi Riwoe

UQP, $29.99 pb, 288 pp

Mirandi Riwoe’s The Burnished Sun is an unforgettable book that liberates women from their marginalised positions, prioritises their points of view, and restores their agency. Winner of the 2022 UQP Quentin Bryce Award, which celebrates women’s lives and/or promotes gender equality, the book’s title derives from The Merchant of Venice, when the Prince of Morocco, sensing Portia’s hesitancy, states ‘Mislike me not for my complexion, /  The shadow’d livery of the burnish’d sun’. Throughout her stories, the exploration of related racist ideologies and outsiderness opens out into brilliant and blistering mappings of intersectional feminism.

Reading craft manuals may be another mode of procrastination for aspiring writers, but Lee Kofman’s latest book, The Writer Laid Bare, is well worth the time. Her sage advice, interwoven with an intimate account of her own creative development as a migrant writer, makes fascinating reading.

Kofman, a Melbourne author and writing mentor, was born in Russia and immigrated to Israel with her family as an adolescent. After publishing two novels and a collection of short stories in Hebrew, she moved to Australia in her mid-twenties, where she struggled to recover her literary voice in a third language.

I performed my first abortion when I was twenty-five years old. I didn’t want to: I had seen abortions performed before and knew the procedure was messy and brutal. The women were lightly anaesthetised, unparalysed, not intubated. Sometimes a woman would twitch, even flinch, under the anaesthesia as her cervix was dilated and her uterus evacuated. I wondered if any of the women knew in a visceral sense what was being done to their bodies. Being pregnant, and then not; afraid, and then less so, the immediate problem solved, the deeper concerns of poverty and violence left untouched by my team. I would see them afterwards. No complications. No, you don’t need to pay. Yes, you can go. By the way, would you like a script for the pill?

I wondered if I should make the transition from onlooker to apprentice. In my obstetrics training, this particular surgery was considered optional; there was no pressure to participate. I didn’t have to be in the operating theatre if I felt that being a witness would conflict with my beliefs. But I showed up, mastered my distress, and watched, flinching at the noises and bright lights that never bothered me ordinarily: the unwieldy theatre spotlight, the legs draped, the vagina on show for all to see, the pregnancy hidden within its folds. Under anaesthetic, you leave personhood behind, you become less a conglomeration of thoughts and feelings and more a type of living puzzle while your body is altered in some way, under the knife, as surgeons say. The drapes isolate the region of interest, cover the remainder, a sort of purdah of the animated self, a necessary alibi for the surgeon to enable that invasion of the bodily sanctity that constitutes all surgery. Cold steel cures.

The anaesthetist was casual, chatty. It’s a simple procedure; even relatively junior anaesthetic trainees are expected to be up to the task by the end of their first year. He was entitled to sit in the background, legs crossed, his upper foot, clad in bright theatre clogs, rotating counter-clockwise, lazily. The registrar scurried around, trying not to let his anxiety show, the IV line was in, saline running, and the patient was off, unconscious.

I once read an article in the feminist press: ‘An Abortionist Speaks’. The author wrote that there was no room for sitting on the fence. If you believe in abortion and are able to provide them, you should act on your beliefs. To believe in the right to abortion and then fob off the task to others is cowardice. Next day, in theatre, I performed my first abortion. It wasn’t technically difficult – the techniques are similar to those used in miscarriages. There was just more – more tissue – to evacuate. The patient didn’t lose much blood, the procedure was uncomplicated. Though it was messy and loud, it was over in a few minutes. I did a good job, not a great one. There was room for improvement, with practice. Wordlessly, the obstetrician in charge of the list patted me on the shoulder. It was done.

‘We are drawn to this China, even though we still do not know China,’ wrote Soviet avant-garde writer and theorist Sergei Tretyakov in 1925. ‘But we must get to know China, we must get to know it well, and we must get to know it quickly.’ Tretyakov’s call was underpinned by a real sense of political urgency: the failure of socialist revolutions across Europe had prompted a Soviet pivot toward Asia, and China had emerged as a potential partner for fostering ‘an international community of enemies of capital’. Yet despite being geographically adjacent, Russia and China had long perceived each other as unfamiliar and distant. In an effort to bridge this divide, a comprehensive cultural campaign was devised to draw China closer to the Soviet public.

Freud once argued that the pleasure of shit is the first thing we learn to renounce on the way to becoming civilised. For Freud, the true universalising substance was soap; for Annabel L. Kim it is shit; and French literature is ‘full of shit’, both literally and figuratively, from Rabelais’s ‘excremental masterpieces’ Pantagruel and Gargantua and the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom through the latent faecality of the nineteenth-century realists to the canonical writers of French modernity.

Australia became the oval on which Britain’s nuclear game was to be played.

Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia

When I was launching my book Atomic Thunder: The Maralinga story in 2016, one of the guests put it to me that the name Maralinga should be just as recognisable in Australian society as Gallipoli. This comment suggested that the British tests had a broader meaning that spoke to a national mythology and were not just interesting historical events.

I have pondered this comment many times since, especially while writing my most recent book, The Secret of Emu Field: Britain’s forgotten atomic tests in Australia. Both of these books provide insights into the national character not of just Britain but of Australia as well, just as the Gallipoli story does. The stories of the atomic tests do not necessarily make for rousing patriotic reading, but instead pose serious questions about how Australia saw itself then in relation to its former colonial master, and about whether echoes of that self-image persist to this day.

Gallipoli remains a foundational myth for this nation, albeit more complicated now, but still embedded deeply in national folklore. At the very least, Gallipoli is recognisable as a place of national importance, wreathed in a comfortably opaque fog of reverence. Maralinga does not have anything like the name recognition or the cultural resonance, and Emu Field and Monte Bello have effectively none at all. Yet at Monte Bello Islands (Western Australia), Maralinga and Emu Field (South Australia), between 1952 and 1963, Australia itself was put to the test, along with the twelve full-scale atomic weapons and hundreds of associated toxic experiments.

One way to understand the British tests is through the concept of nuclear colonialism. This powerful explanatory term captures a global geopolitical hierarchy in which the nuclear-armed countries have, from the beginning, transferred the risks of atomic testing onto countries and populations lower down the pecking order, generally to colonies or former colonies, or to their own indigenous peoples.

The term nuclear colonialism was coined in the early 1990s by the US anti–nuclear weapons testing activist Jennifer Viereck. This species of colonialism is defined as ‘the taking (or destruction) of other peoples’ natural resources, lands, and wellbeing for one’s own, in the furtherance of nuclear development’ (‘Nuclear colonialism’, Healing Ourselves and Mother Earth).

The concept of nuclear colonialism makes at least some of what Britain did during its test series in Australia comprehensible. Australia, as a sovereign nation, indeed had agency in its decision making around the tests, but the fact that it did not exercise it effectively points to the weight of colonial history bearing down upon the individual decision makers. For Britain’s part, the casual way it placed an obligation on Australia and later walked away without a backward glance at the aftermath (until forced to do so by the Royal Commission created by the Hawke government) indicates an imperial aloofness and sense of entitlement in its dealings with Australia.

In The Secret of Emu Field, I mention the ‘peculiar bonds of colonialism’. What I meant was the distorting effect a history of imperial conquest has on former colonies’ relationships with their colonisers, leading sometimes to servility. This was the case in relation to the atomic weapons tests in Australia that saw the federal government ask few questions about the risks of the tests and contribute more to their cost than Britain had even asked for. The Australian government seemed both pleased to be asked and overly eager to volunteer resources that hadn’t been requested. In a personal letter to his British counterpart in November 1953, Prime Minister Robert Menzies assured Winston Churchill of the ‘ancient structural unity’ that bound Australia to Britain.

That ‘structural unity’ was the backdrop for a series of unwise decisions by the Australian government. As I wrote in Atomic Thunder: ‘The truth is unpalatable but must be faced: Australia in the 1950s and early 1960s was essentially an atomic banana republic, useful only for its resources, especially uranium and land.’

Both of these commodities were of considerable interest to Britain, which wanted them with no strings attached. While uranium sales were subjected to harder bargaining by the Australian government, the land was not. Large swathes of Australian territory were handed over with few questions asked and little oversight, especially for the first two test series at Monte Bello Islands and Emu Field in the early 1950s. The two fission bomb tests known as Operation Totem at Emu Field in October 1953 did incalculable damage to the Anangu people of the Western Desert.

The Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia was a mid-1980s exercise in holding the ‘Mother Country’ to account. Menzies was not spared: ‘In taking it upon himself to embrace British interests as being synonymous with those of Australia, and to expose his country and people to the risk of radioactive contamination, Menzies was merely acting according to his well-exposed Anglophilan sentiments. It was consistent with his approach when, as Prime Minister in 1939, he announced that as Britain was at war with Germany, Australia also was automatically at war with the same enemy.’

The Royal Commission is not without its critics, some of whom point to the way it positioned Australia as a victim of Britain rather than an independent nation with decision-making powers, even if these were not well exercised. Scholar Jessica Urwin argues that, contrary to the emphases placed by the Royal Commission, ‘facilitating a nuclear program on Australian soil sought to fulfil British and Australian desires’.

The desire to do business with Britain on uranium exports and the development of Australia’s own nuclear capability were compelling motives, quietly sitting beneath the overt Anglophilia of the prime minister. While there is no doubt that the Menzies government had motivations above and beyond simple sycophancy, colonial history gave Menzies’ motives a ready-made loyalty narrative, but that loyalty seemingly made Australia incompetent when dealing with the dangerous reality of the tests.

Although Britain did consider using some parts of its own homeland for atomic testing, there was no appetite in Whitehall for domestic populations being exposed to poisonous fallout. The merest hint in the British parliament of such tests being held in Scotland or Lincolnshire was howled down. Impassioned speeches were made promising that tests of this kind would never take place in the British Isles, owing to the risks. Instead, Britain made a thorough search of its former colonies and finally settled, somewhat reluctantly, on Australia (Canada was much higher up the list). The people who would bear the brunt of these tests would not be British civilians – they would be Australian.

When the Australian population came to know about the first atomic bomb test, Operation Hurricane held in October 1952, the response was mostly positive. Part of the reason for the equanimity was the obedience of the Australian media, many parts of which were cheerleaders rather than investigators. The entrenched marginalisation of Aboriginal populations was also a factor in the ease with which the tests were established and conducted.

Media compliance was greatly assisted by the instigation of a system of secret D-notices in the lead-up to Operation Hurricane. While Britain had lobbied Australia for decades to establish a D-notice system, Menzies was the first Australian prime minister to acquiesce. These ‘Defence notices’ were not legislated but were instead covert agreements between the government and the media not to report on certain specified activities in the interests of ‘national security’. Flattered at being treated as national security insiders, the media owners all agreed.

President of the Royal Commission, James ‘Diamond Jim’ McClelland, described Menzies’ actions in making Australian territory available for the tests as both ‘grovelling’ and ‘insouciant’. Resources and Energy Minister Peter Walsh, suddenly finding himself responsible for the radioactive mess at the British atomic test sites when the Hawke government came to power in 1983, went further. In 1984, he described Menzies as ‘the lickspittle Empire loyalist who regarded Australia as a colonial vassal of the British crown’. This framing of the tests as an act of colonial servility still dominates in the post-Royal Commission era.

Australia itself was a non-nuclear nation, albeit one in possession of those banana republic goods sought after by a developing nuclear nation. The Australian government was excluded from managing the way tests were conducted and kept itself ignorant of the contamination left behind until years later. During the early tests, at Monte Bello and Emu Field, the Australian Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee did not exist, so Australia
did not have the veto on the firing of each test that was available from 1956 onwards.

Should Monte Bello, Emu Field, and Maralinga have a special place in Australia’s national conversation, as Gallipoli does? After all, Gallipoli is hardly a tale of triumph – it has failure and colonial hubris written all over it. Inasmuch as Gallipoli and the Australian atomic test sites are the places where Australia willingly surrendered its own best interests in a vain attempt to gain favour with its erstwhile coloniser, there are reasons to assent. Like all such endeavours, it backfired. Australia was left with a contamination problem that cost tens of millions of dollars to partially remediate, and an ongoing legacy of illness and anxiety among those who were most exposed to the toxins.

The story of the British tests portrays Australia as an immature democracy, anxious to please Britain. It was a shadowy time, with little information of substance placed before the Australian public for their informed consent. The secrecy of the atomic tests enabled experiments of considerable risk to be conducted and their aftermath to be left unaddressed for many years. These stories may have not so much Gallipoli’s mythic themes of forging a nation in the heat of battle as the rather less palatable ones of ineptness and insecurity that are the consequences of a lack of national direction. Australia did emerge, at least partially, from this post-colonial funk in the decades after the British nuclear tests to seize hold of its sovereignty, but the firmness of that grip is always an open question.

I claim in my books that in handing over part of its territory to a foreign nation for secretive and dangerous activities, Australia’s responsibilities as a sovereign nation were compromised during the eleven years of the British atomic weapons test programs. This larger meaning of the tests gives them ongoing significance as Australia continues to play a subordinate role to ‘great and powerful friends’ that have little real interest in Australia itself.

This commentary is generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The lyric subject, literature’s most intimate ‘I’, has vexed critics for centuries. Is it the poet? Is it a fiction, a device? Or is the relation between author and speaker, as Jonathan Culler suggests, ‘indeterminate’, such that ‘any model … that attempts to fix or prescribe that relationship will be inadequate’? Two new award-winning Australian poetry collections offer fine-grained considerations of personhood and the poem’s capacity to represent it.

Emily Stewart’s Running Time blurs, and at times erases, the line between artificial and human intelligence. The book’s four sections comprise sequences of untitled poems, line endings unpunctuated, free-floating. In the opener, the speaker’s self-consciousness boots up: ‘every summer I doomscroll’; ‘I dive into my cerebral offcuts’; ‘I was hiding my seriousness / and glitched.’ Are we not, wired into phones and computers, already cyborgs? Yet the poem also asserts that ‘the brain filled with shame cannot learn’, a statement that betrays a search for personal growth – and love.

I first encountered Sarah Holland-Batt’s poem ‘The Gift’ in The New Yorker. It begins, ‘In the garden my father sits in his wheelchair / garlanded by summer hibiscus / like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche’ – an unremarkable opening, I thought, to a poem of personal anecdote, a genre too ubiquitous among our contemporaries. Rereading the poem in the context of her third collection, The Jaguar, I became acclimated to her style and manner, and admired the alertness of its verbal performance. If the new book remains a personal memoir, narrating the devastating illness and death of her father, it is also charged throughout with a strong writer’s intelligence and vulnerability. ‘I will carry the gift of his death endlessly,’ she writes, ‘every day I will know it opening in me.’

Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions … From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms, and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old.

Virginia Woolf, in her seminal essay on modern fiction (1919), might have been describing Claire Potter’s method in her fabulous and highly original new collection: Acanthus.  These poems seem to break apart consciousness before it becomes encoded, crystalised, as syntax. As a consequence, they have an uncanny and richly compelling ability to lead you away from the dimension in which you think you have entered the poem, in its opening lines, into something entirely different by the time you have reached the end. Somewhere between the beginning and the end something can be depended on to have shifted – mood, pace, imaginative compass bearing, subject plane. You think you are on one edge, only to find yourself on another. As Potter herself says: ‘on the edges something occurs almost out of the corner of one’s eye like an annotation: this insignificance is precious and full of life … these edges are very important to architecture as well, are such interesting places’ (Author Note). Tangency is evident in some of the titles of these works: for example, ‘Eight-nine Degrees’ and ‘The Art of Sideways’, the latter of which might describe the whole collection.

In 2011, when businessman David Gonski was reviewing education funding in Australia, he visited two primary schools in Sydney’s west. At the first, he found the principal dealing with glass from a break-in the night before. As he sat in the school’s reception, he observed that the children arriving for school were from non-English-speaking migrant backgrounds. When they toured the school, the principal told him of the challenges he faced: homes without books; scant parental involvement. The second school, just a few minutes by car down the road, seemed a world away. The children were in school uniform, Gonski was greeted by a concert of beautiful singing, the buildings were perfect. The school served a different group of students. Truancy was not a problem.

Few Australians today will have heard of the Empress Maria Theresa (1717–80). And yet this queen of Hungary and Bohemia, archduchess of Austria, ruler of Mantua and Milan, who was also grand duchess of Tuscany and Holy Roman Empress by marriage, bestrode the eighteenth-century stage like a dumpy colossus. The mother of some sixteen children, she styled herself as matriarch for a nation, while the marriages she arranged for her children saw her emerge as a Queen Victoria-like figure: the central node in contemporary Europe’s game of thrones. She is, moreover, the sovereign whose likeness has probably been reproduced more than any other, via the celebrated Maria Theresa thaler, a twenty-eight-gram silver coin which became a trade currency around the Mediterranean for two centuries. Her daughter Marie Antoinette may be more famous, but was notably less successful. Unlike that more notorious cake-consuming queen, Maria Theresa died in her own bed, and Austria’s later tribulations only made her reign seem a golden age.

Since his first collection, Letter to Marco Polo (1985), Adam Aitken has been at the forefront of the diversification of Australian poetry as it moved, slowly but irreversibly, to incorporate multicultural and transnational voices. Aitken has always been a world citizen. He was born in London in 1960 to an Anglo-Australian father and Thai mother, with his childhood thereafter spent between the United Kingdom, Thailand, Malaysia, and Australia. As a young man, he attended Sydney University and embarked upon a long career as a poet, editor, and teacher which was recently recognised with the 2021 Patrick White Award.

In July 1887, a group of British naturalists set out from southern England bound for the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha in search of botanical specimens. They left Southampton with high expectations. Charles Darwin, in the 1830s, had visited Fernando as part of his Beagle expeditions and had remarked on the richness of the island, including its thick vegetation. On arrival half a century later, the naturalists found Darwin’s description bore little resemblance to the almost entirely denuded landscape they encountered. Fernando’s topographical metamorphosis was not only the product of ruthless extraction of natural resources but also a strategic precautionary measure undertaken by its Brazilian administrators to restrict the movements of the island’s main inhabitants – transported convicts – who risked crafting the abundant wood into escape boats. Assisting the naturalists with their research were two sentenciados (convicts), one of whom, Marçal de Corria (transported for murder), could converse in English. Thanks to the convicts’ local knowledge, the scientists would gather essential information and specimens that eventually made their way into the collections of the British Museum.

Sam Wallman’s graphic novel Our Members Be Unlimited – ‘a comic about workers & their unions’ – recalls the past victories and the present importance of unions but is haunted by an increasingly attenuated spirit of collectivism. These ‘good ghosts’ of unionism appear halfway through the book during a conversation between two friends, both union members but engaged at different levels of activism. The sequence ends as they watch a fellow worker, oblivious, push his trolley through the trailing ectoplasm of one of these ghosts of collectivism. The two friends look on, bug-eyed, willing him to turn around and notice. So do the ghosts.

This book is a graphic retelling of the history and triumphs of unionism (eight-hour days, weekends, the battle against child labour), and also a polemic: that in the age of Amazon and Uber and Deliveroo, collective bargaining for pay rates and worker rights is more important than ever. As global capital becomes more globalised (and pays less tax), Wallman asserts that workers banding together and demanding better conditions through strike power is a matter of social justice because it will make working people’s lives better. The other characters haunting the margins of this book are sweaty, nervous-looking middle managers and the occasional smugly besuited boss.

It is also an autobiographical account of Wallman’s year as a picker in an Amazon warehouse in Melbourne. Some of the most absorbing sequences in the book detail the minutiae of his Amazon worklife. Wallman’s artistic style (located on the cartooning spectrum halfway between the Simpsons and Salvador Dalí) is well suited to the depiction of subjective experience. His line is bold and clear, but his willingness to delve into the dense physicality of his characters means that his comics are always fleshily embodied. For a book focused on physical labour – pushing trolleys, caring for patients, drawing comics – this is a great advantage. Wallman’s style means that we feel the work that his workers do, and we feel what is done to them. His line insists on the sweat and the strain and the push and the pull. The fatigue. The weariness. It’s skin and it’s bones and it’s arms and it’s legs. We sense the sweet relief of a meal break, or a beer on the footpath outside the John Curtin Hotel.

A spread from Sam Wallman’s Our Members Be Unlimited (Scribe)

Wallman takes advantage of the visuality of comics texts by rendering mental states as physical phenomena. He shows his own body extruding extra brains and morphing into the trolley which he pushes along the endless Amazon aisles. Wallman’s approach to cartooning combines physical bodies dancing with embodied metaphors across carefully designed pages: reading his work is like watching an editorial cartoon being animated. It’s freewheeling and furious – political and personal.

A double page spread depicts Walt Disney’s metamorphosis from childhood, as the happy son of a socialist drawing pictures of top-hatted fat cats, into an efficiency-obsessed slave driver, railing against his workers’ ‘communistic’ unionising. The pencil-moustached Disney is depicted febrile with rage, as the world around him transforms into a parody of his animated films: lamps with eyes, lightning bolts from tiny brow-circling storm clouds, white gloves …

If this book has a fault, it is that it can occasionally come across as breathless: there is so much Wallman has to say about unionism as a vital brake to unchecked capitalism; so much he has to say about the need to convey this message.  Visually it is busy, excitingly so: colour and image bleed to the edge of many of its pages, and Wallman favours visually complex layouts, which give our darting eyes continual puzzles to untangle and decipher. With these levels of visual activity, Wallman or his editors have made a deft choice in making the opening and closing sequences of the book wordless, gently inviting us into and ushering us out of the dense world of this book.

Orwell, by Pierre Christin (script) and Sébastian Verdier (art), is a graphic biography of George Orwell originally published by the major French bandes-dessinées (comics) company Dargaud. Published by English comics outfit Self Made Hero, this translation (by Edward Gauvin) appears on the shelves alongside other Orwell graphic novels, including two adaptations of 1984.

As a writer, Christin is a big name in the French comic industry, and in addition to the beautifully realistic black-and-white artwork by Verdier which tells us the life story of George Orwell, née Eric Arthur Blair, he has called upon other heavy-hitters, including André Juillard, Blutch, and Enki Bilal, who provide short colour artwork interludes which represent Orwell’s major works. This is an elegant solution to the problem of inserting Orwell’s famous oeuvre into his life story.

The brevity of the comics form, as in cinema, imposes a requirement that the script writer needs to take up a tight angle on biographical material, and the names of the chapters: ‘Orwell before Orwell’, ‘Blair invents Orwell’, and ‘Orwellian Orwell’ tell us how Christin and Verdier have approached this task: they focus on the point at which Blair becomes Orwell. They are telling us the author’s life story in order to illuminate his writing. Many of the pages feature Orwell’s writing, denoted by a typewriter font in among the narration and dialogue, another visually elegant solution.

This book is overtly the repayment of an artistic debt that Christin feels to Orwell. But the book is not a hagiography; the ‘heroic’ Orwell is often shown as bull-headed, with unfortunate consequences (getting shot in Spain, contracting pneumonia in England).

For a comic honouring a writer, Orwell features many fine wordless panels to convey Orwell’s feeling for wild England, which was, as per Rebecca Solnit’s Orwell’s Roses, a source of solace and strength for him. This book also deploys wordless panel sequences – the rolling of a cigarette, the shooting of an elephant, a glance at a child’s face in the Underground during the Blitz – each of which imparts an impassive melancholy to the character of George Orwell created in this graphic version of his life.

For at least the first half of the twentieth century, Australian playwrights were not held in high regard by their compatriots. Popular opinion was summed up by fictional theatre manager M.J. Field in Frank A. Russell’s novel The Ashes of Achievement (1920):

‘I’ve got a play,’ commenced Philip, plunging.
Field jumped from his chair, hands spread out in defence.
‘Help!’ he yelped. ‘Anything but that. Not a bloody play, I ask you.’
‘What are you frightened of?’ he asked, when Field had resumed his seat.
‘I’ll tell you, Lee, on the understanding it goes no further. Australians can’t write plays; there you have it in a nutshell.’

As I started to read this book, right-wing extremists stormed the US Congress, spurred on by a president who was unable to accept defeat at the ballot box. It has long been recognised that Donald Trump is a narcissist, but, as Ute Frevert aptly points out in The Politics of Humiliation, narcissism and shame are closely related. Trump feels humiliated by his defeat and is therefore psychologically incapable of accepting his loss, on any level. But there is another side to Trump’s behaviour: he has been quite ‘shameless’ in the way he bends truth and humiliates other political leaders.

Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert was arrested at Tehran International Airport on 12 September 2018 as she prepared to return home to Australia. A lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Melbourne, she had visited Iran for a seminar on Shia Islam. Her captors were the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, or the Sepâh, a powerful militia that protects Iran’s Islamic system. She was bundled into a car and driven to a secret location. As interrogations began, she was also served a large piece of chocolate cake. The nature of this first encounter, terrifying and strange, would typify her coming dealings with the Sepâh, an outfit that seemed as haphazard and amateurish as it was menacing.

Frances Wilson lives in London and writes for the TLS and the New York Review of Books. The author of six biographies including Guilty Thing: A life of Thomas De Quincey and Burning Man: The ascent of D.H. Lawrence, she is currently working on a life of young Muriel Spark.

When did you first write for ABR?

I was invited onto the ABR Podcast last summer and subsequently asked by Peter Rose to review Dream-Child, a new biography of Charles Lamb.

What makes a fine critic?

A distinction needs to made between the critic and the book reviewer, because not all reviewers are critics. The reviews that run in the literary pages of newspapers – plot synopsis followed by puffery or condemnation – bear little relation to criticism, not least because critics read closely while reviewers tend to speed-read. Criticism is an art, and the finest criticism should be equal to its subject: a good critic should have a distinctive voice, a good ear, and a strong style. I like audacity and eccentricity in criticism, and I particularly admire those critics who are alert not only to the words on the page but to the ‘unconscious’ of the text – what is elided, repressed or not quite expressed in the writing.

Shon Faye, trained as a lawyer before moving into advocacy work, brings her multi-disciplinary background into an unflinching look at where trans people in the United Kingdom are now, what lead them here, and where we go next. Consciously forgoing memoir, Faye takes a systematic approach to learning from history, clearly laying out the case for trans liberation.

In the opening pages, we learn of the suicide of Lucy Meadows, a young teacher and a trans woman. As Faye unpicks the immediate and circumstantial paths that lead to this event, we glimpse a tapestry of transphobia that, by the conclusion, is thoroughly unravelled. The introduction presents a litany of trans people (both alive and dead) bearing the brunt of endless scrutiny. The next seven chapters give voice to the conditions faced by trans people, and how we might glimpse liberation through the muck of a transphobic society.

True crime books sell. Few of them, however, are as well written as this book. John Shobbrook’s Operation Jungle is one of the most entertaining and gripping memoirs of law enforcement in Queensland that has been published by the University of Queensland Press. It is set during Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s controversial premiership (1968–87). Nostalgically recalling a time before the internet and mobile phones made the world a smaller place, John Shobbrook’s stories of solid detective work and police corruption are persuasive and well told.